Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “profiles”
On a Sunday night 15 minutes before midnight in early November, a group of undergraduate engineers is still wide awake. They’re stationed at TechPad, a local coworking space, trying to figure out how to not catch their Hyperloop pod on fire. “So, could we find a more efficient way in a triangle configuration?” asks Bobby Smyth, a senior from Yorktown, …
Last winter, a team of engineering graduate students regularly ventured out to Virginia Tech’s Kentland Farm. They’d drive past fields of cows and farmland until they reached a small garage and strip of asphalt. It’s here they’d unload a set of autonomous vehicles: several drones and a ground vehicle. They’d place markers made of tape and tarps on the concrete …
Crafts and tools line the walls inside brightly painted rooms at the end of the first floor hall in Virginia Tech’s Falls Church campus in the National Capital Region. It’s here in the Qualcomm Thinkabit Lab at Virginia Tech that, since 2016, more than 5,000 students and teachers, primarily from underserved and underrepresented communities in the D.C. area, have wired, …
The story of the Center for Power Electronics Systems begins in a single room in Patton Hall. Fred Lee, at the time a new addition to the Virginia Tech faculty, decided to establish a lab that focused on the small but growing field of power electronics. It was 1983. Today, power electronics touches nearly every aspect of modern life: cell …
Fred Lee, a University Distinguished Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founder and director of the internationally known Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES), will retire from Virginia Tech in September 2017. After 40 years at the university, Lee, who is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, has made immeasurable contributions …
Thomas J. Grizzard, Jr., professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and former director of the Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, died unexpectedly on June 24. He was 70. “Our hearts are heavy with the news of Tom’s passing,” said G. Don Taylor, the Charles O. Gordon Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and interim dean of …
Abigail Smith, of Cleveland, Ohio, says she lives by the words of renowned cellist Pablo Casals: “To live is not enough; we must take part.” It’s a mentality that the 2017 Undergraduate Student of the Year carried through her four years at Virginia Tech, and one she plans to maintain after graduating in May with a bachelor’s in industrial and systems …
Troublemaker Scientist. Heroic Professor. Accidental Ethicist. Those are just a few of the national media titles given to Virginia Tech’s Marc Edwards over the past quarter-century as he exposed problems with potable water in Washington, D.C.; Flint, Michigan; and other areas of the country. Most recently, Edwards was recognized by the university with a new title: University Distinguished Professor. The Virginia Tech …
When Bobby Hollingsworth thinks of his childhood years in Botswana, he thinks of the scenery and of a seven-year-old named Prosper. The son of Hollingsworth’s nanny, Prosper was Hollingsworth’s first childhood friend. In the late 1990s, Prosper died of HIV. Not long after, Prosper’s parents also died. At the time, five-year-old Hollingsworth didn’t know much about the virus that weakens …
Coming to Virginia Tech was an easy decision for Tobin Weiseman, a Blacksburg native. Figuring out what he wanted to study wasn’t as simple. Weiseman spent his freshman year studying business before having a realization: He wanted to study science. He quickly found a home in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where he picked up his primary major, human nutrition, …